LAHORE: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on Friday briefly appeared before Special Court in Rs16 billion money laundering case filed by the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) against him and his son, Hamza Shahbaz.
After posting bail bonds totaling Rs1 million apiece, the prime minister and his son, a prominent PML-N member, were granted bail in the case earlier in July.
Hamza did not show up in court today because he had requested an exemption due to his health. The prime minister also requested exemption from the session shortly after it began because he had “urgent” affairs to attend to.
At the outset, the premier’s lawyer, Amjad Pervaiz, told the court that his client will appear before the court in a while. Shortly after, the premier arrived at the hearing.
Pervaiz began his arguments by stating that the first information report (FIR) filed against his clients stated they were involved in Rs25 billion worth of money laundering from 2008 to 2018 through fictitious organizations.
The FIR also mentions that the Sharif Group’s firms were used for money laundering, although Shehbaz was neither a director nor a shareholder of those companies throughout those ten years, therefore the allegations are of a general nature.
Pervaiz claimed that the FIR was filed following an investigation and that Shehbaz was not mentioned in the report’s opening passages.
Interrupting his lawyer, PM Shehbaz said he wanted to speak. The court allowed it.
Please excuse me as I must leave for some essential business in Islamabad, but not before I want to say something.
The prime minister said before the court that while serving as Punjab’s chief minister for 20 years, he took choices that “damaged” his family’s sugar company.
He remarked, “I was asked to give subsidies to sugar mills, but I declined because the money (that would have been used for subsidies) was of the poor people of Punjab.
The prime minister said that the money laundering allegation against him was “fake” and insisted that he never gave sugar mills a subsidy.
The FIA filed a complaint with the special court in December 2021 accusing Shehbaz and Hamza of laundering Rs16 billion in a sugar scandal.
The investigating team “detected 28 benami accounts of the Shehbaz family through which money laundering of Rs16.3bn was committed during 2008-18. The FIA analysed a money trail of 17,000 credit transactions,” the FIA report given to the court states.
According to the investigation, the money was “provided to Shehbaz in a personal capacity” and maintained in “secret accounts.”
